Page 3 of Famous for a Living

Jacquie, however? When I pulled back the tissue paper this morning to see next season’s not-even-released-yet Jimmy Choos, I was floored.

I carefully lower myself in my heels and begin collecting the candles from the floor. In my periphery, the countdown clock turns. Less than twenty minutes to go. “Anyway, you know how Bobby is.” I turn back to the subject to comfort myself more than anything. “He lives by his own schedule.”

“Manipulates everyone into thinking he’s an eccentric genius with all his talk of ‘protecting one’s mind castle from the manufactured construct of time,’ when in reality he’s just a man-child who doesn’t have the brain cells to work an alarm. Yes. I’m aware.”

Serena and Bobby went to the same elitist school growing up. As best as I have been able to gather, Serena’s disdain was birthed around a certain swing set on a rubber-mulch playground where, during recess, the children took on the habits of their stockbroker parents, using mulch as currency while those with the fullest pockets ran the playground. Evidently one dark day Bobby and his gang of fellow five-year-olds refused her access to a certain tire swing despite her healthy stash of rubber mulch.

The act was unforgivable.

All the candles mercilessly tossed aside, Serena picks up a butter knife. As she considers the pothole-covered cake, she tilts her head, the butt of the golden knife glinting as she taps her chin.

In this moment Kiel, carrying in a charcuterie board on a silver platter, steps up the top step, takes one look at Serena with the knife standing over his prized cake, and spins back around.

I hear the platter drop loudly at the bottom of the stairs and bite my lip. And there goes my favorite caterer.

And just then, the hum of commotion below alters.

It’s nothing that a typical person would notice, but like a dog aware of the high-pitched tune inaudible to the human ear, and with this many years in my line of work, I recognize a shift in atmosphere. I know how to read a room blindfolded.

I move back to the railing and search the gatherers below.

People milling around.

Pointing to my artwork on the walls.

Snapping up shrimp cocktails from passing waiters.

A girl inching toward the end of the hall where my bedroom door stands closed, clearly nosing around.

None of this raises any suspicions.

None of this is the cause.

But there.

Ah. Yes.

Her.

A girl has slipped through the doorway, her slim fingers loosely wrapped around the elbow of Travis Demurabi—a younger, handsomer version of YouTube success Finance Pete, who helps people open their one-participant 401(k), all while talking between bites of drunken noodle filmed by the dim light of his computer screen.

But people aren’t watching him.

It’s her.

The slender face of the girl making her way beside him through the crowded foyer.

From a single glance I can list the shops she called upon to make her ensemble. The simple black turtleneck curled loosely around the porcelain skin of her neck from Alexander McQueen. The leggings of equal nondescript simplicity from the same, giving her the air of Audrey Hepburn. The Gianvito Rossi suede and plexi pumps, of which Serena herself is wearing a sister pair. Then, of course, the bold red wing wool scarf from Ji Cheng that envelopes her, matching the dramatic Cassiopeia-red lipstick on her perfect, heart-shaped lips.

She owns the room.

She can’t be more than eighteen, and yet for a moment, she owns the room.

“Do you have any clementines downstairs? I want to add them around this corner,” Serena says, her brows knitted as she peers at the cake.

I move for the lotion in my purse, looking at the rapidly transforming cake as I do. Most of the icing potholes are smoothed over now; on one side she seems to be building a garland of fruit running all the way down to the cake stand.

“I don’t think so.” I rub lotion methodically over my fingers, forcing myself not to think about the concerning bluish vein that popped up along my outer thigh three weeks shy of my thirtieth birthday. Or the way the skin on my knuckles carries more and more cracks lately.